DarkStarZumaBeach writes: "For US Slashdotters, you may not be aware from TV and newspapers that the El Hierro volcano is active in the Canary Islands. You may also not know that the western end of El Hierro is beginning to fail, and is likely to slip into the Atlantic with perhaps a hundred or more cubic kilometers of rock and debris, generating a mega tsunami. See the recent deformation data plot HERE. For mega tsunami simulation, follow the story URL to a YouTube clip of the simulated La Palma island volcanic landslide tsunami with an update for El Hierro.

If you don't know this, it isn't because the US government is talking about it. The USGS just posted a mea culpa page HERE stating that they are unable to monitor earthquakes in the Canary Islands — even though they have a historic working relationship with Spain's own National Geographic Service — and full access to the Canary Islands seismometer RSS reports HERE. It would seem odd for the USGS to ever fail to report any quake over a magnitude 2 — since that is well within the realm of underground nuclear testing activity. Yet, the USGS failed to report on El Hierro's 3.1 and 4.3 magnitude quakes in the week ending Oct. 14th, 2011.

Meanwhile, the earthquake quiet Eastern Provinces of Canada are planning on participating in the Oct. 20th "The Great Shakeout" public safety exercises — which originated with California. But, the US states on the Atlantic Coast don't even think earthquake awareness is worth spending time and money since protecting the life of citizens isn't as important as raising campaign money from corporate donors who don't want their financial markets to crash when the public realizes they are in great risk from El Hierro.

The Federal government isn't that stupid: It knows enough to preserve itself and coordinate the efforts of survivors: So, FEMA just had the first-ever activation briefing with broadcast engineers on Oct. 13th for the first-ever nation-wide test of the Emergency Alert System slated for Nov. 9th at 2pm; So, on Oct. 10th, Dobbins ARB ran a disaster recovery exercise for the fleet of Airforce Reserve C130s with an exercise premise of an exotic "flu" outbreak — which required airlift recovery of blunt-force trauma patients; So, the US Army Contingency Contracting Infantry Corps are put on mobilization alert without destination orders; And, so, the US chain-of-command is put on "campaign" and "foreign good will" travel so that they can survive a direct tsunami hit on Washington, DC. Meantime, all the troops in Iraq are ordered home by Dec. 31st — just in case the Feds need them to enforce martial law on what's left of the US Atlantic Coast.

Obviously, volcanoes are unpredictable — so alarming the general public is not useful if it crashes financial markets. On the other hand, not planning evacuation routes to safety areas at least 100 miles from the Atlantic Coast will result in huge traffic jams when the usable alert time is just over 5 hours from El Hierro landslide to mega tsunami landing on DC and Florida.

Oh, and by the way, unlike the US Pacific Coast, there is no such thing as an Atlantic Coast Tsunami Warning System.

Meanwhile, as a fellow Slashdotter with IT concerns, it is clear that major US data processing centers will be at risk, since many are built on, or near, flood plains. Worse, land-based telecom and power are likely to be disrupted. The only reliable sources of power will be backup generators and batteries. The only reliable communication system will be shortwave radio and Internet by satellite. For my IT team, for food, we have the staff fridge and the junk food machines. For meds, we have one first aid kit and a portable stretcher. For backups, we have Iron Mountain.

So, when was the last time you inventoried the emergency supplies at your data center? Do you even have waterproof matches and candles?"